Around The Lion of Florence – a 1801 painting by Nicolas André Monsiau – an array of men is bustling about, carefully securing the canvas to a wall at the infamous Musée d'Orsay. The sight of them makes you wonder whether these people have escaped from the painting: Given their effortful gestures and theatrical poses, the painter could well have incorporated them into his composition. But it was photographer Nicolas Krief's eye that caught them at the exact moment when an invisible, miraculous dialogue was woven between the valiant hangers and the painting's heroine – a mother raising her arms to the sky and appearing to be shouting at them: "Please be careful!"

For over 13 years, the French photographer, who regularly works for the press, has toured the greatest museums in France and Europe immortalizing the behind-the-scenes of the greatest exhibitions, from the Louvre to the Natural History Museum, via the Grand Palais. What began as a commission for Le Monde, on the occasion of the Claude Monet retrospective at the Grand Palais in 2010, has become a long-term personal project and a book published this autumn by Editions Gallimard, Musée. The pictures are accompanied by an enlightening text written by historian Stéphane Guégan, a curator of many major exhibitions, talking about his trade.

It is a project to which Krief has applied his usual method: No staging, no accent lighting, and no cropping. "I always work like a street photographer," said this admirer of photographer Larry Fink. "I spot a situation, position myself, and wait, sometimes for a long time! My quality is making people forget me."

His images, full of facetious winks, show the back-and-forth between art and life, humorously cultivating the confusion between what the works show and what's going on all around them. Marble bodies sensually caressed by hands of flesh. A young man with long hair and the look of a musketeer emerging in front of a copy of Caravaggio, or a young girl dressed in the same green as Niki de Saint- Phalle's Nana.

Fun distance

The photographer has allowed life and fiction to penetrate his shots of these works, deprived here of their pedestal, and therefore of their usual superbness. Enclosed in a soap-cleaned display case, a bust of a young woman becomes a strange Medusa topped with a moss snake, and an empty black frame on a black background next to an all-white painter suggests a contemporary minimalist installation.

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